Tag Archives: political parties

Another Reason

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…to reduce investments in the PRC: it’s getting harder to get the money back out, this time from foreign exchange controls designed to be limits on how much money in yuan can be exchanged for other currencies, like the US dollar, the British pound, and the Japanese yen.

China’s foreign-exchange regulator in recent months has deployed a new system to monitor individual purchases of foreign funds and has asked banks to reduce foreign-currency transactions. It has summoned bankers to its offices to give guidance and has grilled them when foreign-exchange activity spikes, according to executives at Chinese and foreign lenders.

Nice little bank you got there….

But it’s more than just threats; the government controls are having material impacts on business’ ability to do straight-up cross border business.

A European chemicals manufacturer recently faced delays in Shanghai in obtaining US dollars, threatening its deadline for an overseas licensing payment. The Bank of Tianjin is having trouble getting funds from mainland investors for a planned Hong Kong public stock offering. A water-treatment company struggled to withdraw $2,000 for an engineer to travel to the US.

And

[Hong Kong law firm Harvey Law Corp Managing Partner—Worldwide, Jean Francois] Harvey said a Chinese client is having problems wiring $15 million to a Hong Kong company that for two years has been helping it buy equipment for a South American factory. “There’s no indication that the money will go through,” he said, “and we heard from our client that it was due to restrictions on money transfer.”

It goes on from there.

The Need for a Republican President

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The need is starkly illustrated by a couple of developments involving cases, the Supreme Court, and Justice Antonin Scalia’s death.

One development is this:

Dow Chemical Co had agreed to pay $835 million to settle a class-action case rather than risk an appeal without the conservative justice.

The other is this:

The state Rifle and Pistol Association decided against filing a petition asking the Supreme Court to hear the case fearing the conservative Scalia’s death will make winning the case virtually impossible.

[Rifle and Pistol Association President and National Rifle Association board member, Tom] King said his lawyers advised that going forward could damage the case because the High Court at the very least would likely deliver a split 4-4 decision that would leave the law in place.

This puts a very high premium on electing a Republican president, so we have a good chance of nominating and confirming a conservative judge to the Supreme Court.

The Left’s Iron Curtain

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…is getting a bit taller. I wrote earlier about the Democratic-Progressive Party’s wish to erect an Iron Curtain to keep American companies from leaving for more economically (read: tax) sound environments. Now, Democratic-Progressive Party Presidential candidate and proud Progressive Hillary Clinton is enlarging her Iron curtain. Clinton now is proposing this:

Companies that move jobs and production out of the US would lose previous years’ tax breaks under a proposal Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton released Friday during a speech in Detroit.

The US would seek to “claw back” previous tax incentives for research and development and for domestic manufacturing associated with facilities or jobs that move abroad.

On top of that,

The Clinton campaign didn’t have an estimate of how much money its tax plan would generate for the government.

Of course not. The purpose isn’t to recover monies foregone as incentives to do this or that, it’s strictly to imprison private enterprises within the US, Soviet-style—because private enterprises aren’t jobs factories, rather they are, according to this candidate, jobs welfare programs.

Remember this in the fall.

Global Warming, Again

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A guest essayist at Watts Up With That has an interesting article. Here’s the closing paragraph (as usual, RTWT):

In summary, approximately 81% of the warming in the last century may have resulted from all anthropogenic influences, as suggested by figure 4 [see the article]. This includes water vapor, CO2, methane, nitrous oxide, and land use changes to the albedo and thermal mass. CO2 may account for as much as 52% to 56% of the contribution from anthropogenic drivers (See Figs. 1 & 2). Fossil fuel-CO2 represents less than 75% of anthropogenic CO2. If we were successful in completely phasing out fossil fuels over the next 100 years, we would have a reduction of 50% in average CO2 emissions. If the Earth is warming at a nominal rate of 1°C per 100 years from all influences, then we can hope, at best, for a reduction in temperature increase of 20% (0.54×0.75×0.50) or 0.20°C. That is to say, if the world were to phase out fossil fuels in the next 100 years the warming would be 0.80 degrees instead of 1.00°C! Unfortunately, eliminating fossil fuel use will probably not be successful in significantly reducing future temperature increases, even if it can be accomplished.

A whole two tenths of a Centigrade degree, out of a climatista-expected entire one Centigrade degree. Imagine that.

Criteria for Serving as Supreme Court Justice

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Here are President Barack Obama’s (D) criteria for his nominee to replace Justice Antonin Scalia.

…judges who approach decisions without any particular ideology or agenda, but rather a commitment to impartial justice, a respect for precedent, and a determination to faithfully apply the law to the facts at hand….

So far, so good. But.

…a judge who knows that “justice is not about abstract legal theory, not some footnote in a dusty casebook.”

And

It’s the kind of life experience earned outside the classroom and the courtroom; experience that suggests he or she views the law not only as an intellectual exercise, but also grasps the way it affects the daily reality of people’s lives in a big, complicated democracy, and in rapidly changing times.

In other words, Obama still is looking to emphasize empathy over law. He wants the superior wisdom of the wise Latina. He wants the Constitution creatively interpreted and updated. He wants a Justice who agrees with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg that the Constitution is alterable because it lives through judicial rulings. He wants a Justice who agrees with Chief Justice John Roberts that enacted law is accessible to wholesale rewriting in order to arrive at something then worthy of application.

He does not want a Justice who recognizes that the Constitution lives through Article V and that Constitutional amendments and statutes and their changes are political rulings accessible only to We the People and our elected representatives.

He does not want a Justice who will adhere to his oath of office, which requires the Justice to defend and uphold the Constitution rather than to change it, an oath that also requires the Justice to understand and apply only the text of the Constitution and of enacted law, as they are written.

I agree with some, including Obama now, that the Senate has an obligation to consider his nominee(s), even in the last year of his term—a time frame Obama and his fellow Democrats have said should be exempt from Supreme Court nominee consideration. But the Senate has no obligation to rubberstamp Obama’s nominee, and any nominee who meets these criteria is unfit to serve as any sort of judge, much less a Supreme Court Justice.

Full stop.